Top all-time · #12970
Joannes Vermorel
Personal blog · blog.vermorel.com/journal · on HN as vermorelprogrammingbusiness
Joannes Vermorel's personal blog at blog.vermorel.com covers programming and business. Since 2017, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Could we solve blockchain scaling with terabyte-sized blocks?”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this blog's posts on Bitcoin and blockchain scalability, especially the terabyte-blocks proposal, as sources for block-size arguments. The comments do not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Could we solve blockchain scaling with terabyte-sized blocks?3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-12-18
- /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-02-26
What Hacker News says?
Bitcoin Cash does currently scale up to Paypal's daily number of transactions while keeping transaction fees below $0.01. [0] Scalability tests are underway [1] to detect bottlenecks for increasing the block size further, which should take it closer to Visa's transaction capacity. The scalability roadmap aims for eventually supporting 50 daily transactions for each human in the planet, again keeping fees low, which…
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “We are removing the option to create new subscriptions”Submitted Could we solve blockchain scaling with terabyte-sized blocks? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIt might be too late, but for others, PeerTube, open source replacement of YouTube, is the solution. Longer discussion https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2021/4/30/peertube-to-repl...
Comment linking /journal/2021/4/30/peertube-to-replace-youtube.html
on “Tell HN: YouTube and how my wife lost 7 years of work”Submitted Remarkable software engineers write remarkable code as a story · 3 points
HN discussionBlockchain scalability while keeping decentralization is now a solved problem, you can research how sharding is implemented in cryptocurrencies such as XTZ or EGLD, or read this rationale [0] for terabyte blocks in Bitcoin Cash. Why do blockchains such as BTC or ETH refuse to scale on-chain then? That's a separate debate, but I believe there are vested interests in them not scaling. Regarding volatility I agree that…
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn”Submitted Large scale reuse of FFP2 and N95 masks as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe energy expense of Bitcoin is dominated by its Proof-of-Work algorithm, the cost of processing transactions is negligible compared to that. And the PoW operates over the root of the last block's Merkle tree, which is a hash of all the transactions in the block. Being a fixed-size hash it doesn't matter if the block contains 1,000, 1 million or 1 billion transactions. Therefore Bitcoin could scale to handle millio…
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn”Submitted Reuse of medical masks with sterilization via ionising radiation as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> But as far as I know the maximal number of transactions is capped in practice. What do you mean? There are no hard technical impediments to Bitcoin being able to scale to worldwide usage with basically the same structure as today. It's a matter of optimizing software and having powerful hardware (that is available today, and will be even cheaper in the future). This article by Johannes Vermorel [1] goes over it in…
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “Coin Carbon Cap – PoW cryptocurrencies ranked by energy efficiency”Submitted Canonical Transaction Ordering for Bitcoin [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere are no technical reasons keeping Bitcoin from achieving universal usage (50 daily transactions for each of 10 billion humans) while keeping fees low. This article has a great analysis of not just the technology but the economics and decentralization of the network: http://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-...
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “Turkey bans use of cryptocurrencies for payments”Bitcoin doesn't need "everyone processing everyone else's transactions", only full nodes need to check transactions for validity. Bitcoin's whitepaper proposes SPV wallets, which are meant for end users and require minimum disk space and network bandwidth, and no need to run a full node. I recommend this technical article on how Bitcoin (in its Cash fork) can scale to worldwide adoption (50 tx per day for each of 10…
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)”Here is a proposal for terabyte blocks: https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks... It works out just fine and there will enough profit from sub cent transaction fees to have thousands of competing data centers. At that point you could even declare the system to be more cost effective than any other kind of financial infrastructure. Any complaints against Bitcoin's excessive energy consumption wo…
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “Bitcoin not for me, says Bill Gates”The 7 transaction per second limit of BTC is completely artificial. It stems in the max size of blocks being capped to 1 MB. This was introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto way back in 2010 as an easy way to keep spam from flooding the blockchain. Keep in mind that back then Bitcoin was basically worthless, so one could spam the network with millions of transactions at very low costs, rendering it unusable to everybody. Sat…
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “Could the US Dollar Be Crypto's Killer App?”Hi All, long story short, it is possible, and limited trials have just been started in France with specialized actors. More details (in French) https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2020/3/23/sterilisation-de...
Comment linking /journal/2020/3/23/sterilisation-des-masques-par-rayonnement-ionisant.html
on “Ask HN: Irradiation to reuse surgical masks?”Back story: Lokad has been a long time client of Microsoft Azure since 2009 even before the production release of (Windows) Azure. Unfortunately, the story of deploying over Azure has been a mess for more than a decade now. Five years ago, I was posting half a dozen of competing solutions to deploy code https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2016/8/29/the-sad-state-of... Now, there would be a couple more entries. SshRun…
Comment linking /journal/2016/8/29/the-sad-state-of-net-deployments-on-azure.html
on “SshRun, run .NET code remotely over SSH”Large blocks scale just fine. Even with today's consumer tech we can have gigabyte blocks. It takes 0.8 seconds to transfer over a 10-gigabit connection. Storage is cheap, 4TB drives are under $96. Modern CPUs are incredibly fast at cryptography. And all of it is constantly getting cheaper. And we won't need gigabyte blocks for a few years. Then if you look at cutting edge tech, we can already do terabyte blocks. ht…
Comment linking /journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-for-bitcoin-cash.html
on “Some thoughts on blockchain scalability and future research”